FELLOWSHIP – January 19-February 12, 2017

fellowship (‘fe-lo-ship) noun
: companionship, company
: a community of interest, activity, feeling, or experience
: a new play by Julie Marie Myatt, to be presented by Cornerstone Theater Company in January/February of 2017
: a volunteer service opportunity for Los Angeles-area audiences

The eighth play in Cornerstone’s Hunger Cycle, Fellowship is a performance that immerses you in the role of volunteer, giving you the opportunity to do something useful for hungry people in Los Angeles.

Five souls find fellowship in giving their time to a weekly volunteer shift, making sandwiches for a local food bank. They work hard, sing, laugh, and share stories of what brought them to this service. This weekly time together is their church and sanctuary until the day a stranger enters. What happens when Hunger comes to visit?

fellowship, the eighth play in Cornerstone’s Hunger Cycle, is an immersive experience that puts you in the role of volunteer. At fellowship, you will be invited to help prepare and assemble sack lunches to be distributed to hungry people in Los Angeles. Join us at fellowship, and let’s get to work!

Creative Seeds are a host of art-filled events inspired by and created with our collaborating communities. Below you will find information about the Creative Seeds we hosted for fellowship, a play for volunteers.

30 DAYS OF SERVICE From January 14- February 12, 2017 we sought to inspire 100 new volunteers throughout Los Angeles by providing a variety of opportunities at our many community partner organizations, and encouraged people to #LETSGETTOWORK!

Fellowship: At The Table, a 3-part discussion with leaders, advocates, and community members doing something to end hunger in Los Angeles. At The Table discussions were held at Cornerstone Theater Company and recorded LIVE on Facebook as part of the Creative Seeds programming for fellowship, the play for volunteers. We have uploaded the 3-part series below for you to view.

Being of Service in Los Angeles: What does successful volunteerism look like?

Julie Marie Myatt

Playwright
Julie wrote A Man Comes to Fowler, for Cornerstone’s Institute Summer Residency in the agricultural town of Fowler, California. Her play Someday premiered as part of Cornerstone's Justice Cycle in 2008. Other works include: The Happy Ones, premiered at South Coast Repertory; Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, premiered at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and performed at the Kennedy Center as part of the Center's Fund for New American Plays; My Wandering Boy, premiered at South Coast Repertory in 2007 as part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival and produced in New York as part of the 2007 Summer Play Festival; Boats on a River, premiered at the Guthrie Theater, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and recorded for the LA Theatre Works radio play series "The Play's The Thing"; Mr. and Mrs., premiered at the 2007 Humana Festiva; and The Sex Habits of American Women, produced by the Guthrie Theatre, Signature Theater in Arlington, VA, among others, and premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Julie’s work has been developed or seen at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Seattle Rep, Cherry Lane, A.S.K. Theatre Projects, LAByrinth Theater Company, Denver Center Theatre, among others. She received a Walt Disney Studios Screenwriting Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights' Center, and a McKnight Advancement Grant. She is currently working on commissions for ACT Seattle, Roundabout Theatre, and Yale Repertory. She is a resident member of New Dramatists.

Peter Howard

Director
Peter is a founding member of Cornerstone Theater Company. Born and raised in Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English and American Literature and holds a M.F.A. from the Department of Drama of the University of Virginia. With Cornerstone, Peter has performed in, written or otherwise collaborated on scores of productions in Los Angeles and around the country. As a playwright, his Cornerstone credits include Zones (an original, audience-interactive play exploring interfaith themes), an American Muslim adaptation of You Can't Take It with You (the first adaptation ever approved by the Kaufman and Hart estate) and a bilingual adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding (Boda de Luna Nueva: New Moon Wedding, created for the small California agricultural communities of Western Stanislaus County as part of the company's 2005 Summer Institute). His regional theater work includes productions at the Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf, and Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Peter has served on staff of the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ), working as a facilitator, playwright and director in a variety of youth arts programs that use theater as a springboard for dialogue on challenging human relations topics. He has directed the participatory youth script development and performance programs of a number of regional theatres including the Mark Taper Forum (The Speak to Me program) and Shakespeare Festival/LA (Will Power to Youth). Peter is also the author of three plays (collectively known as the Compassion Plays series) now touring southern California high schools, colleges and community groups through ENCOMPASS, a youth development organization based in the San Gabriel Valley: Wheels explores youth attitudes toward immigration; Kick explores the Native American mascot issue in high school sports; Horizon Line explores the root causes and impact of bias-motivated crime.

Marcenus “M.C.” Earl

Actor
M.C. first came to Cornerstone as a community member back in 1993 during the company's Watts Residency when he appeared in Love of a Nightingale and Breaking Plates. Other community collaborations M.C. has appeared in include Broken Hearts, For Here or To Go?, For All Time and the ongoing Beyond the Diagnosis, Cornerstone's partnership with Gilead Sciences, Inc. to promote HIV/AIDS awareness through theater. M.C. is a graduate of USIU San Diego's B.F.A. Acting Program.

Page Leong

Actor
Page Leong has been a member of Cornerstone’s Ensemble since 1994, acting, writing, directing, and choreographing over 60 productions. As a performer, she has played at the Mark Taper Forum, Arena Stage, The Public Theater, Classical Stage Company, the Joyce Theater, A.R.T., LATC, Doolittle Theater, Getty Center, Long Wharf Theater, Pasadena Playhouse, MOCA, Actors’ Gang, Singapore Rep, East West Players, Highways Performance Space and in vibrant communities across Los Angeles and the nation.

Favorite roles include Medea in Bill Rauch and Tracy Young's Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, Nina and Maddy in Alison Carey’s A California Seagull, Antigone in Shishir Kurup’s An Antigone Story, Olivia in Carey’s Twelfth Night or As You Were, Ling in Chay Yew's RED, Cosmic Clown in Murray Mednick’s Coyote Cycle, and The Therapist/Singer in Lisa Loomer’s Café Vida. She has garnered Dramalogue and Garland awards, and Ovation and LA Weekly nominations for her performances. Her recent film and television credits include Argo, Bourne Legacy, NCIS, The Fosters, Whitney, and Revenge, among others. She holds Bachelor and Masters degrees in Dance from UCLA.

Page directed Kurup’s one-man shows, Assimilation and Exile: Ruminations on a Reluctant Martyr, at the Mark Taper Forum, The Public, and Highways. She also directed her play, Afloat, Kurup’s Sid Arthur, and Suzan-Lori Park’s 365 Plays for Cornerstone, as well her short films Glimpse and Potluck, and Sigrid Gilmer’s short films, Head Trip and Long Term. In addition, she has directed readings for the Music Center and HBO, and co-directed Dan Kwong’s What No Ping Pong Balls? at Highways.

Other writing includes adapting her play, In a WORD, for HIV/AIDS communities in eight cities across the country. Her play, atTraction, in the Los Angeles Downtown Arts District, was featured on the cover of American Theater.

Bahni Turpin

Actor
Bahni trained at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and later at the Lee Strassberg Theatre Institute. While in NY she appeared in productions at Crossroads Theater, American Place Theater, New York Renaissance Festival, and also began her film and television career with appearances on Law and Order and in the films Daughters of the Dust, The Saint of Fort Washington, Rain Without Thunder, Getting In and Theory of Achievement. Since moving to LA Bahni has become a yoga teacher, and has had numerous guest spots on television including E.R., Judging Amy, Seinfeld, The Parkers, Star Trek Voyager and Girlfriends, to name a few. Additional film credits include Brokedown Palace and Crossroads. Bahni has also had the good fortune to participate in a number of theatrical productions in Los Angeles. She was awarded a Dramalogue award for her work in Mules at the Mark Taper Forum and has appeared in several other productions at the Taper. Just prior to joining Cornerstone, Bahni became a working finalist at The Actors Studio. In joining Cornerstone, Bahni hopes to cover some new ground and bring her work to more people in new ways.

Hunger Action Los Angeles (HALA) works to end hunger and promote healthy eating through advocacy, direct service, and organizing. HALA works with low income people, non-profit organizations, and concerned residents to educate public officials about powerful anti-hunger legislation in conjunction with other groups statewide. We publish the annual People’s Guide, a guidebook of public social services for people working in the field, people in need of help, and those just helping their neighbors. HALA operates the Market Match program at over 30 farmers markets throughout Los Angeles, putting more money for fresh fruits and vegetables into the hands of low income consumers and by extension, California farmers.

With dignity and respect, powered by volunteers, MEND’s mission is to break the bonds of poverty by providing basic human needs and a pathway to self-reliance. Starting as a small group of volunteers working from a garage, MEND has grown primarily by word-of-mouth into one of the leanest operating non-profit organizations in existence. More than 94% of the support and donations received by MEND, now the largest poverty agency in the Valley, provides emergency food, clothing, medical, vision and dental care, job skills training and job placement assistance, English as a Second Language classes, youth activities, and a Christmas program.

Project Angel Food’s mission is to feed and nourish the sick as they battle critical illness. Volunteers and staff cook and deliver nutritious meals, free of charge, to homes throughout Los Angeles County to alleviate hunger, prevent malnutrition and return our clients to health. Our vital food and nutrition services, including medically tailored meals and nutritional counseling, help underserved people throughout LA County who are too sick to shop or cook for themselves. Created in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we expanded our mission in 2004 to help our neighbors who are struggling with any life-threatening illness burdened by hunger and malnutrition. We deliver more than 10,000 meals every week to people in need…for Life, for Love, for as long as it takes.

Westside Food Bank’s mission is to distribute as much food as possible to local agencies with food assistance programs and to reduce food waste on the Westside of Los Angeles County. As the food bank warehouse for the Westside since 1981, we annually distribute 4.5 million pounds of food to over 70 local social service agencies. We do not distribute food directly to individuals, only to agencies.

Food Forward’s rescues fresh local produce that would otherwise go to waste, connecting this abundance with people in need, and inspiring others to do the same. Food Forward collects fresh fruits and vegetables that would normally go to waste from backyard fruit trees, public orchards, farmers markets, and the downtown Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market. 100% of the produce we recover is donated to hunger relief agencies across 8 counties in Southern California.